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Share Paper 3627

Presuppositionality and Syntactic Nominalization in Finite Clausal Complements
Rebecca Jarvis
166-175 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper argues against a proposal by Kastner (2015) which suggests that, cross-linguistically, presuppositional and only presuppositional complements are syntactically nominalized. The present paper draws on evidence from English and Northern Ndebele (Bantu; Zimbabwe) to argue that presuppositionality and nominalization do not display a bijection cross-linguistically. The paper argues that English that-clauses are best analyzed uniformly as CPs, based on selectional evidence and in comparison to other types of English clausal complements. It also incorporates data from Pietraszko (2019) on Northern Ndebele to argue that, in some languages, non-presuppositional complements can be syntactically nominal. This double dissociation suggests that presuppositionality cannot be tied cross-linguistically to the presence of a particular nominalizing determiner. Instead, it supports a more nuanced view on which presuppositional complements might take on a selection of typically nominal-associated properties.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
Table of contents
Printed edition: $645.00